On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Bob Arning wrote:

> If you want to try something a bit different in browsing, check out:
> 
> http://www.charm.net/~arning/BobsBrowser.txt
> 
> Note: the more you like categories, the less you may like my offering.

Hi Bob.  I meant to respond to your posting earlier, and I was just going
through my old emails and noticed it.

Thanks for the change set pointer... I tried it out and it is a nice break
from the traditional Smalltalk browser.  The thing I like the most about
it is that you have a lot more room to view more code at a time.  You
could even have 5 or 6 of your browsers open at once.  I don't know if I'd
like it as much for browsing though an unfamiliar class (where it's nice
to be able to see the method & method category list while you're
browsing)... although I suppose if I can keep a method list window open
separately, that still works pretty well.

I have some ideas for a somewhat different system browser that I'm tempted
to try to write in Squeak... kind of a pet project that I've been thinking
about for awhile.  The basic idea is to attack the problem that Smalltalk
browsers have with only being able to see one method's source at a time.
It's a little bit related to how yours works, except that you'd have a
single class hierarchy always visible, and you could select multiple
classes from that, which would appear in a "stack", and then you could
select multiple methods from the classes, which would appear in another
stack.  It would need to take up most of the screen... the idea being that
you would only run one of these browsers at a time, instead of having
multiple regular browsers open at once (so you woulnd't have the wasted
space of same category/class panes in multiple browsers).

Anyway, it's easier to draw on a sheet of paper than to describe verbally.
I just need to get around to prototyping it sometime soon...

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technogies, Ann Arbor, MI
  dway at eai.com, dway at mat.net
  http://www.transom.com

  Smalltalk: Guaranteed Y2T Compliant